Hear that, whiny libs? You don’t need big government helping you with your medical bills; you just need someone to beat the shit out of you so you can’t actually spend money other frivolities like poker. Wait, is the implication here that Snuffy got beat up during a poker game, because he cheats all the time? This is really a self-solving problem when you think about it.

Dick Tracy, 12/6/18

Ah, it seems that Polar Vortex’s sinister plot, focused on faxing and slow-walking invoice payments, has been brought down in ironic fashion, because the evil crime syndicate’s record-keeping was too meticulous. We’ve heard enough — time for the cops to show up and brutalize a lot of people with flagrant disregard for due process!

Luann: Of course. Tara couldn’t be lying passed out in a frat house having drunk her weight in beer. No. She got a new phone and didn’t port her number. About on par for this strip.

Beetle Bailey: Were the artwork a bit worse, but only a bit, the final panel could be a Six Chix. I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Pearls Before Swine: I don’t know if Pastis knew the irony he wrote. Inuits make up a small part of the over 200 recognized Alaskan native tribes. If they’re not referenced by their tribe’s name, they’d rather be called the generic “Eskimo” than the incorrect specific “Inuit.”

Mark Trail: Oh thank God the first panel was a closeup of Raul’s eye and not up the nose like some other strips do.

Rex Morgan: I thought the RUPF (Random Upward-Pointing Finger) died when Mary Worth changed artists. Guess I was wrong.

Gil Thorp: Clearly this Kelly (and her boss, “Joan Anderson”) have never watched “The Americans,” or they would know that even Cold War-era Soviet spies couldn’t keep a travel agency afloat once Orbitz.com came along. But the way Kelly is tenting her fingers Mr. Burns-style, she seems to think she’s stumbled on a business that will make her rich — probably by charging clueless students premium prices, then booking them on Spirit Air and pocketing the difference.

Snuffy Smith: This seems to be Loweezy’s family-finance plan: 1. Don’t make any money, but also don’t lose any money. 2. ??? 3. Profit.

Dick Tracy: Based on this guy’s outfit and toupee, he should be be earning his living as the successor to Mr. Roper and Mr. Furley as the landlord on “Three’s Company.” The police sirens are probably just a hilarious misunderstanding that everyone will laugh at in the end.

Mary Worth: “Say, would you mind helping me buy a tire?” Mary slyly says to her neighbor — which means she’s either planning to foist her cat on the poor lady, or bury next to Mr. Wynter under her rose garden.

Blondie: I’m pretty sure not everyone is as happy with Mr. Dithers’ man-hugs as Dagwood seems to be. The unwanted-touching lawsuits will probably cost him a lot more than a holiday bonus ever would.

9CL – So the plot has completely changed once again, seemingly at random. It’s not about the TV show or Arthur fleeing the country to avoid a commission or the fuck music or thoughts of love, now it’s about trying out for a part in a play.

Whatever. I’m more worried about how these two spend their time. I guess they meet up every morning then head out to wander the empty void together all day? Is she still spying on him so he won’t flee? Or do they just have nothing better to do?

“Oh, I adore cats Mary. But my new boyfriend Jeff is horribly allergic to them. My late husband was sick for so many years and we could not have marital relations. Dr. Jeff fills that void, and how. Sorry. Go check with that Wilbur fellow.”

GT: A high school kid in 2018 going to a travel agency? A travel agency existing in 2018 that isn’t pretty much dedicated to cruise ships? I don’t even have a joke, I’m just kinda stunned at this being a plot point. Any kid I know (who, was like, a high school kid with enough money to travel to Italy, which, hmm?) would be telling his buddies, “Sure, lets get some pizza, on the way I’ll book a trip on my phone”.

GT: “Italy? Ok, let me just get your beeper number and I’ll fax off a few documents. Can you pass me that phone book? God, I’m so glad the 80s never ended…”

BGSS: Huh, I’d always figured that the Smiffs lived off the land along with a little subsistence farming, but now I find out that they actually have a source of monetary income? I’d be tickled if we were to find out that Loweezy had been working as, say, a chartered accountant this whole time but I fear that the truth is too disturbing for me to actually type out…

DT: Hmm, so I guess Fred Jones is working solo these days? I’d ask where Scoob and the rest of the gang are at, but given the haggard look on his face (and the fact that this is Dick Tracy), I’m guessing the answer isn’t pretty.

MW: Estelle thinks Mary is offering her tickets to a broadway musical. She’s going to be disappointed…

GT: Joe has it figured out. Since Kelly is obviously the person who’s been giving Kaz the film titles to drop into his conversation, she’s obviously also the person who gives him the questions and answers for his World Geography quizzes. “I’m interested in Italy, but Machu Picchu sounds interesting, too! Do you happen to know much about it?”

Like a blind squirrel stumbling across an acorn, Dick Tracy seems to have found an actually relevant story for today. No, not the drug dealers hanging around schools—the temp bringing down a corporation.

MW: “Yeah, yeah, dead husband, mourning, deeply moving, whatever. Can you take my cat?”
Also, if this woman says yes, then this was an exceptionally pointless plotline, even by Mary Worth standards. Is Mary just gonna go around pawning pets off on people now? Is this some sort of racket she’s set up with the animal shelter?

Luann: Was Luann about to say “Maybe she died”? What the fuck? Why would you even say that?

MT: Wow, what a wacky stock comedy trope to invoke but not actually show, instead focusing screen time on what we really need to see: pointless extreme closeups on whatshisface’s poorly-drawn eye.

GT: “Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open the doors and … oh shit! Customer! Uh, hi, I’m Kelly! Can I help you?”

Snuffy: Now I’m just picturing some burly, disgruntled gambler brutalizing Snuffy’s fragile, toddler-sized body. Even here, convalescing in his own precarious home, Snuffy finds no respite. He’s surrounded by chortling, tongue-wagging giants who take amusement in his pain.

DT: Most of what I know about organized crime comes from watching Fat Tony on The Simpsons, so I know it’s a bad sign when you start referring to money as “the monies.”

MW: Today, even more so than usual, Mary talks like someone who is demonstrating English phrases for ESL students.”Hello, Estelle. How are you? Do you like cats? I am taking a bus to the library..”

DT: I continue not to understand why “I’ll tell Pitchblende about the money Miller put in trust with us, but I’ll pretend I need to continue to hold it, and delay paying his bills out of it as much as possible” is a better plan than “I won’t tell Pitchblende about the money, and just keep already having it with no-one being any the wiser”.

Phantom: There’s probably a Friendship is Magic joke here, but I’m not going to admit I know enough to make it…

RMMD: “I hope the citizens of Glenwood will agree with you that my cooking is good enough to make up for having to wash the dishes because I haven’t hired anyone, because that’s basically my business plan!”

Even Luann is bored by the lack of action in the strip. Sure, acting nervously excited at the thought that one of your friends was assaulted or murdered seems odd to you, but Luann lives in a world where nothing of consequence has happened for years.

I just can’t get over how horribly mishandled this entire pet storyline was. The previous arc about Tommy’s drug addiction was a little off-putting — Tommy replacing his addiction to booze and drugs with an addiction to Brandy isn’t as much of a success story as the writer thinks it is — but this current arc is somehow worse, and it feels like it’s been running for six months at least.

My hope is that once Mary dumps Libby, they’ll just time-jump to another story line. Whatever they have planned next can’t be worse.

Wow. Kelly’s travel agency offers trips to Sol, our very own star. Visit lovely Sol! The weather is always sunny and ranges from a balmy 5700 to a steamy 15,000,000 degrees Kelvin. But it’s a dry heat! Pack some high-SPF sun block, a pair of nice shades, and get ready for the tan of your life.[1] Only $8,000 round-trip![2]

[1] This tan will result in death.
[2] This is a one-way trip.[3]
[3] Unless you go at night. Then you’ll be OK.

Nancy: In today’s installment, Nancy breaks the fourth wall. Actually, for all we know, two of the other walls are broken, as the artist took the time to show only the one in the back. There’s one door shown, but who knows how many other doors may have been broken in the process.

Perhaps Mary Worth needs to utilize this technique. She turns to her audience and muses: “Say… do you like cats?” Then she breaks down all your walls until you agree to take in her latest stray.

MW – I was enjoying this story, with the cat tormenting Mary by jumping up on the table and all. I should have known it was too good to last – here it comes, Mary steamrolling an innocent bystander into doing her will.

9CL – When did Nan-Lin start wearing teensy dresses instead of turtlenecks and sweater vests? It can’t be because of whatever the weather is, because they’re walking around in a void with no backgrounds and no climate.

There’s another eleven months of this garbage to go before they finally boink and Brooke introduces a new unpleasant couple.

Crankshaft: are mall Santas in such short supply that they have to hire the meanest, most miserable sentient being in the known universe? Even Vogon poetry is more pleasing to the ear than the sound of Ed Crankshaft saying Merry Christmas.

MW: I know what it means to lose someone but if a neighbor randomly offered me a cat I might just respond with a death glare.
GT: is this Travel Agent Kelly actually assistant coach Mullet’s girlfriend?

Do you remember that scary short story about the young woman who never, ever removed the red ribbon around her neck, and her husband kept wondering why? One day after 20 years of wondering he decided to undo the ribbon around her neck, and as soon as he did her head fell off and rolled across the room, and it said, “That’s why I never take off my ribbon!”

I think that’s what will happen if she takes off the turtleneck. It’s the only thing holding her head in place.

MW: Well, we all knew this day was comin’ – Libby’s gonna leave her starring role. Yeah, she said she just couldn’t take any more pussy jokes! Lawyer Lou (aka The Fixer) has worked out a deal with her where she’ll drop the workplace harrassment suit in exchange for an undisclosed amount of cash and treats. The MW suits really want her to stay – she’s sent ratings through the roof – so they’ve set up some sort of off-panel role for her with this random two-legger. I understand that if things get into a slump she may make a cameo appearance, and there’s also an option for a floating head.

I just hope she doesn’t renege on the deal and publish a meow-all book….

@Baka Gaijin: “I don’t know if Pastis knew the irony he wrote. Inuits make up a small part of the over 200 recognized Alaskan native tribes. If they’re not referenced by their tribe’s name, they’d rather be called the generic “Eskimo” than the incorrect specific “Inuit.””

He’s more accurate than ironic. He’s lampooning woke white liberals taking up the cudgels on behalf of native people or minorities who don’t give a rat’s ass what they’re called. See: crusades against “demeaning” sports mascots.

@grsblvnyk: Contrary to popular belief, travel agencies are doing all right for themselves these days, with Millennials (who favor unique, off-the-beaten-path and Instagram-worthy experiences) being one of our strongest growing demographics. The profession has changed a lot with competition from online booking engines and Costco, but the reports of its death which were circulating a decade ago have been greatly exaggerated.

FW: You know, the rest home could have handled this themselves by feeding both partners penicillin and telling them to wear jimmy caps. Only their disgust for Funky made them come up with this plan, once they heard dad bragging about finding moves he didn’t know he had. I know it’s making me ill, and I’m not related.

ASM: Who’s writing these strips. Who says “at the homecoming of my wife, the movie star.”

BG&SS: I’m frankly scraping the bottom of the barrel by mocking hillbilly grammar, but the doubling-up of contractions in “you’d druther” really irks me.

DT: I’ve barely been following this whole contract story and I was never particularly smart to begin with, but is this “original” contract agreement of any value whatsoever? If they have a more recent contract, wouldn’t that overwrite any previous arrangements?

MW: Uh oh, Mary’s been watching too many Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers films and it looks like the part of “Estelle” is being played by Mary in a gray wig. Luckily that should smooth over this cat transaction. (Either way, it’s another win-win for Mary, since she can get rid of her unwanted animal and receive lavish gratitude from Estelle for giving her life meaning again.)

ASM: “I say, is that heavily-muscled fellow lifting his 110-pound girlfriend over his head? Why, he must be a superhuman, an arachnid-themed one at that, and no mistake! There could be no other explanation!” (Seriously, I lift more than this and I barely ever get knocked out by falling chunks of masonry.)

MT: “Buenos noches”? How much time has passed? Let’s see. Mark, Rusty, and Mara woke up and rode with Joe to Harold’s dig site pretty much first thing in the morning. They spent five, ten, maybe 30 minutes tops listening to Harold ramble about satellite imaging or something, then Rusty and Mara went directly to a nearby temple, then left there within five minutes for town. They’ve since been snooping around and fleeing from a discount Hell’s Angel for no more than an hour. By my measure, it should be mid-afternoon at the latest and probably closer to lunchtime.

6C: So, this is a goth girl committing suicide, played for laughs? Or a blonde woman diving headfirst into a pile of charcoal briquettes, something something make-up am I right ladies? Goddamn it, Mary Lawton…

Mary Worth: Mary: “To quote Thoreau, ‘A disobedient cat is a perfect substitute for a dead husband.'” Estelle: “Really? Because I’m an English professor specializing in 19th century poetry and I don’t recall–” (But Mary has already dumped Libby at Estelle’s feet and run off to the next storyline)

Gil Thorp: Joe and Kelly run away to Italy, where the age of consent is 14, to consummate their love. Kaz now has more time for his spotting bro, Gil. Ah, I love it when a Gil Thorp storyline wraps up neatly.

My guess is that cheating was the only way he “earned” an income. So, Snuffy being laid up might as well be Snuffy being laid off from a paying job. The sword swings both ways.

Mary Worth

Before you know it, Mary will be on the street corner slinging cats for sale like a busker.

Nancy

Friendship and the Snooty Kid Who The Artist Made a New Font For.
(In all seriousness, it is good– albeit noticeable– that a font is being used. It’s good that it is being improved upon though. Because the kerning for some letter pairs was startling to see.)

Heathcliff

meow Heathcliff is rubbing one out as they say.

For what it is worth, there was a previous one where he summoned a genie with a lamp. Why was he doing this magic for that in an alley and why is he doing this magic with a trashcan in an alley? Just give that cat a wizard hat and this strip will almost appear pedestrian! Get on it, Gallagher!

Blondie

Laughter is the best medicine. So, quit your job, Dagwood and get the last laugh on Old Man Dithers and maybe your eating disorder or your metabolism will correct itself.

Mark Trail

The past couple of weeks have been filled with a crazy chase scene mostly involving the person doing the chasing. Other than the couple whose home he literally dropped in on, Chopper Scarface is the only recurring character who has been shown almost daily.

The kids: who knows where they are?
Joe/José: Dust in the wind
Mark Trail and his dirt digging buddy: Digging dirt by spinning those fancy tires on that fancy SUV.

Chopper Scarface is in the house though! Literally! It’s just the house of some strangers he dropped in on, during their dinner, onto their dinner table. Literally.

Well, I should not have written that it is good that a font is being used. I guess it is more likely a young cartoonist, even one who has taken calligraphy classes or has made their comics for a while might still speed up production and maintain consistency by using a font.

So, it isn’t good, exactly. But, it is good that the font might be improved over time. The strip will continue to change visually as long as she is doing it. So, I’m being patient about some of the other things. But, in fairness, there aren’t a lot of straight up visual gags. There have been a few, for sure, but not a lot. The strip might well evolve when and if the visual gags are explored more.

That said, if anyone likes it or not, the strip is popular in a way that is good for all comic strips in the short and long runs.

Mary Worth: Ya know, when I got my cat, the shelter made me sign a document saying if I ever wanted to get rid of him I’d have to bring him back to the shelter. Then again, the shelter didn’t call me saying they needed someone, anyone, to take him.

@Northernlurker lighter less filling: When I suffered a life-changing tragedy, indeed a cat-fanatic friend offered me cats as a consolation. I like cats, but at that point I was on the verge of homelessness, so I turned her down and cut her off.

FC: Grandma smiles, fond memories of playing hide the candy cane with young Chris Kringle flood her mind. Her nether region begins to tingle. Damn it, she thinks, did the old man Winkerbean give me the clap?

MW: This targeting was deliberate. A younger woman in Charterstone has just been widowed, so Mary now has a potential rival. By giving her a cat, Mary will make sure that Dr. Jeff doesn’t start paying Estelle any house calls. It’s called “marking your territory”.

MW – After the foreshadowing of buxom Mary luxuriating in her bed, I think Mary’s comment to the lonely widow was originally “Say! Do you like pussy?” But the editors are as ham-fisted as the colorists.

Was Estelle a pre-established character in “Mary Worth”, or was she added to this strip solely as a “saved by the bell!” plot-resolving contrivance? Because if it’s the latter, that’s lame even for this strip. Libby herself only showed up because of an implausible deal with a pet shelter. Writers should only use one implausible contrivance per story arc — you can start a plot line, or end a plot line, but the rest of the story should be well thought out.

You”re Batiuking up the wrong tree. Grandmama was seduced by Edd Crankshaft down at the mall, between the Forever 21 and the Pretzel Stand. Who would have thunk that she would be the #metoo poster child from the funnies?

@Sequitur: re Ballard Street: “Yuk,yuk,yuk” Well, I think this puts to rest the myth that “Moose are funnier than Elk”. What’s the joke supposed to be? A Moose driving? So? I guess it’s a step up from being strapped on the front fender.

Yeah, I know this guy… Manny, from Manitoba. I hope this scene is just staged, and he’s not *really* driving. He likes to hit the fermented berries a little too much, IYKWIM. But ya gotta know his career has hit the skids if he’s appearing in Ballard Street. Thank goodness I invested my earnings wisely.

DT: If Mr. Ugly Crystal’s Dad is really lucky the MCU will arrest Polar Vortex for drug trafficking before Vortex murders him for eying documents he wasn’t supposed to see, but were left out where pretty much any schmo could find them.

GT: “Specifically I’m thinking of Saló, of the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini’s boundary-pushing adaptation of the Marquis de Sade, interspersed with…”
*travel agent pushes silent alarm button under her desk*

MW: I’m not saying Mary invented the art of manipulating suckers into thinking you’re doing them a favor when they’re actually doing you a favor, but she does seem to be the current reigning champ.

SSmith: Somehow Snuffy getting beaten up by the other players has made his family solvent. He should try palming an ace into the deck more often.

@TheDiva: This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that, actually. Which makes sense. If you just want to buy a ticket from, say, Oshkosh to New Orleans then yeah, buying online could be the way to go. But a travel agency can give you something a little more unique.

@Decima Dewey: Mary’s deal was to foster Libby, not adopt her. I was hoping for a ‘foster fail’ wherein the foster host adopts the pet, but of course Mary is doing as she should for a foster pet – trying to find it a permanent home. I still think she’d be better off with Libby than with Jeff, but hey, Mary can’t always listen to her tummy brain.

GT: hmm, Kelly is slightly steepling her fingers, with ends entwined. If I understand body language correctly that means she’s horny and wants movie dude to do her, right now, this moment, on the desk. At least that’s how interpret her body language.

I’m sorry; I was trying for funny at the expense of clarity. Here’s the story, as best as I can explain it:

The first PCs used a code called ASCII to represent characters, but it had only 256 (8-bit) values. So Chinese, Japanese, Bengali, etc. users adopted their own “native” codes to represent local character sets. This got hilariously complicated, so international standards outfits came up with Unicode, with a 65,536 (64-bit) range.

Some applications (Microsoft Word, whatever input software you’re using) still put out “native” characters. Some display functions, like the Preview function here, will accept both native and Unicode. But others, like the main WordPress publishing engine, require Unicode — the standard and always the safest choice.

But Unicode is a pain in the ass! A single character like অ is represented by a string like this: & # 2437 ; (with no spaces) — where “&” says “I am an html entity,” “#” means “I am using decimal notation” (“x” means hexadecimal), “2437” is the decimal code for the Bengali character “অ,” and “;” is a terminator that means “I am done now.”

So typing a string of Bengali characters is a huge table-lookup and coding task. But there are utilities to help. In the Vikku.info utility here, paste the Bengali characters from your input application into the box at left — the correct html should appear in the lower box. Copy-and-paste that into the comment box here, and voila, I hope.

Note that this utility will also transliterate English into Bengali, phonetically, as Sequitur and Baka showed above, but that’s not what you’re going for, I think.

Pluggers: I think I figured out why pluggers drive oil burning junkers. It has nothing to do with thrift or lack of income. Despite their outward appearence of sentience they still lack the brain capacity of the humans they overthrew. They don’t possess the ability to design and manufacture new automobiles.
They can only mimic the lifestyles and technology of their former masters. Plugger doctors wear little reflective mirrors on their heads because that’s what were depicted in old comic strips drawn by humans. They utilize whatever mechanical devices survived the Animalapocalypse in working order.
That explains their fondness for Eisenhower era technology. It’s user friendly for the ham-fisted (or ham-pawed) do it yourselfer. But someday those rusty pickup trucks, rotary dial phones, and CRT televisions will wear out to the point they can no longer be repaired.
At that point the pluggers will be forced to return to a pre-19th century agrarian economy. Shortly afterwards they will enter a Dark Age where oral traditions and mythology will take precedent over writing. They may even regress to a hunter-gatherer society. The rhinomen, who once lived at the bottom rung of the plugger societal pecking order, may find themselves on the A-list in a culture that values brute strength and brawn over brains.
Plugger elders, with only a dim historical memory of the former times, will regale plugger youths with tales of their ancestors, a race of demi-gods who rode fire-belching steel chariots into battle, and captured lightening in bottles to illuminate their houses without fire.
Eventually, as they lose the knowledge to make clothing and shelters, they’ll devolve back to their former predator-prey status. But maybe someday the germ of evolution will take hold again and they’ll begin the slow climb to civilisation.

MW: Shelter staffer: “Hi, Mary. We have room for Libby here at the shelter now, unless you’ve decided to adopt her, which would be great and would only require that you sign the paperwork here at the office with a few requirements for her care.”

Mary: “Libby? You mean the cat? Oh, she’s gone. She made my boyfriend sneeze and leave, so I pushed her onto the first random person I met in the hallway here. Can’t remember the name, sorry. I think it was a woman.”

MARY WORMTONGUE: Mary, Mary, Mary, these are beneath you. You’re coasting. Just about any punk kid old lady could push dogs and cats on unwilling recepients; for you this should not be a challenge, even if you did it with your eyes closed and half of your tongue tied behind your tonsils. If you really want to get into shape to making a run for the Meddling Biddy event at the next Olympics, you need to seriously up your game. I suggest you move from mere dog and cat placement into finding new homes for, say, Tasmanian Devils, Komodo Dragon Monitors, and rabid Wolverines. Try it; you’ll thank me later.

Sorry, bud. It’s 15% now. Ya wouldn’t believe the cost of doing business these days. Why, my air freshener bill alone is in three figures. And my intern keeps wantin’ to get a salary, since he got his PhD. But like I told him – where else is he gonna get a prestige position like this. He’s lucky I only charge him $500 a month for the privilege.

MW: As someone who has worked to help find good homes for stray rural cats for thirty years, allow me to emit a very loud scornful laugh. Yeah right, people who love cats never have cats already and are always happy to welcome cats into their no-cats-but-perfectly-suitable-for-cats homes! Finding homes for cats is like rolling off a log, it’s just so easy! And I know a royal personage in Nigeria who is longing to give all of us large sums of cash.

9CL: Oh geeeeeez. Can we please skip directly to the point (har!) at the end of YEOMAN where Jack falls to the stage floor and lies there insensible for the rest of the performance? And if he could stay that way for several weeks, what a wonderful holiday gift to many 9CL readers that would be.